oday, people are playing ball with one eye looking up at dollar signs. They figure they cannot make it by playing defense and by being a sacrificing team player.
Tag Archives: Red Auerbach
Farewell to Bob Cousy, 1963
A couple of players were in one corner, autographing basketballs. Auerbach was sitting alone, reading mail. We shook hands, and I said, “What about Cousy?”
“What can you say when you know you’re going to lose the greatest backcourtman who ever lived?” Red said. “Nobody will ever take his place. There’s only one Cousy.”
Bob Cousy Day: Take Two, 1963
There were no stoics at the Garden. Men and women wept without shame and with pride and love. It was like that folk song line, “The tears flowed like wine.”
Three-Point Shot: Pro Basketball’s Big Bomb? 1971
Imagine the excitement in Madison Square Garden if one of the Knicks sank a three-point play in the closing minutes of a stretch-run game. It would be pandemonium.
They Laughed When Tom Heinsohn Sat Down to Coach, 1975
Heinsohn absorbed his knowledge of coaching from Red Auerbach. His insights into people, he acquired from personal, and sometimes painful, experience.
Bill Bradley: The Reeducation of Princeton Bill, 1970
Bradley himself doesn’t think this game is much work. He thinks it’s fun, and older men will tell you those who feel that way about it—and who have the necessary and special talent—get to be the great ones.
The $10 Million Gamble to Save Pro Basketball: Bill Walton and Larry Bird, 1980
The Clippers and Celtics paid a fortune to get them. Now, they and the rest of the league can only hope Walton and Bird get back the fans and make pro basketball “The Sport of the 1980s.”
Goliath Comes to Tinseltown, 1968-1969
Contrary to popular opinion, the Lakers and their opponents, though agreeing that Los Angeles would be formidable, had reservations about the Super-team label and scoffed at the thought that the Lakers had anything locked up.
Are NBA Games Losing Their Excitement? 1979
There has been a great deal of hype since the merger of the two leagues to the effect that things have never been better, either on or off the floor. “All the stars are under one roof,” they say. That’s true, but the question is: What game are they playing?
Walter Bellamy vs. the NBA, 1963
The money he makes is considerable salve for the aches and bruises that he absorbs working at his job. At a workout a while ago, a gash was opened on his left wrist.